War Clock
by Jocelyn
Summary: AU. Rangers and their crews have a thing about keeping time. After two of the Wei brothers survive Otachi, Raleigh goes to offer them what help and experience he can, but faces the ghost in his own memories in the process. Chuck Hansen witnesses the effect of combat drift on Mako, and Mako looks back on her life and her new partner's after their first battle. Complete.
1. Spiritus Ex Machina

_**Author's Note: **__I fell head-over-heels in love with the rich, diverse, and gritty world of Pacific Rim the first time I saw it in March. Under the influence of SO MANY FEELS, this two-part story exploded to life in a single weekend! It also now has a sequel and a prequel, delving into the struggles, joys, and grief of our heroes, deviating a little from the movie canon on the outcome of the battle of Hong Kong. I suppose you could call this a "fix-it fic," although for the fates I've fixed, I've only added to the angst!_

**War Clock**

**Chapter One: Spiritus Ex Machina**

Mako slept like the dead.

Like most kids who'd lived in the Shatterdomes for any length of time, she'd learned to live and sleep surrounded by the constant thudding of machinery, the clang of metal, and the whoop of warning klaxons. Nobody slept through the last one - that was the point - but apart from the alerts, Mako's generation had been well-trained to sleep through noise.

Raleigh was a little disappointed when he didn't pick that up from her. But he was still stuck with insomnia and now had her nightmares as a bonus.

He probably should have expected that. Yancy had been an instant-sleeper too, and Raleigh had never managed to get that particular trait from him either. After Knifehead, it had only gotten worse, and sometimes he would go thirty-six to forty-eight hours until sheer exhaustion drove him unconscious.

Fortunately, Mako hadn't lost the ability to catch a few Z's after drifting with Raleigh, although neither of them slept much after the first drift up through the catastrophe in Victoria Harbor.

However, it turned out the death toll wasn't nearly as bad as they first feared. Cherno Alpha's unorthodox design made it nearly impossible to use escape pods, but Otachi gave her pilots a gift: blowing the reactor caused the whole conn-pod to blow free. The Kaidanovskys hit the surface with the rest of the debris, unnoticed. Unlike Cherno herself, Sasha and Aleksis were expected to recover.

Two of the Wei brothers also lived through the demise of Crimson Typhoon. Only two. After the conn-pod was crushed, Hu had still been _compis mentis_, it seemed, and had managed to jettison his brothers' escape pods. His own rig had been too severely damaged, and from the condition of the body, the medics doubted he'd have survived the trauma of the jettison anyway. Jin had compound fractures throughout his left leg and hip, and it might be years before he managed to walk again. Cheung had lost an arm.

And together, they'd lost a brother. Out of all the situations Raleigh had wanted to avoid when rejoining the PPDC... this had to rank in the top three. No, make it the top one.

After Jin and Cheung escaped the infirmary, he went looking for them anyway. How could he not? Mako would have gone with him, but by then she was dead on her feet, not used to the energy drop-off that came after combat drift. "Get some rest," he muttered, giving her a gentle nudge towards the barracks. "It might be easier on them without an audience." She let him persuade her.

Coming into to Typhoon's now-empty bay, the staccato punch of the basketball on the concrete was louder than ever. But it was slower than before, only the most basic rhythm to it... like a heartbeat. A stuttering, uneven heartbeat at that.

Following the sound to maintenance headquarters, he could see why. Jin was seated in his wheelchair against the cleared utility table, one leg in a full cast extended out on another chair. Leaning to one side, he was dribbling the ball between his hands and occasionally passed it to Cheung, who was on his feet and tried to catch it in his single hand. One sleeve of his pilot's jacket swung loose against his side.

Both of them had bandages wrapped around their heads and half their functioning limbs, and their exposed flesh was black and blue and red. Jaeger pilots after combat lent themselves well to news cartoons, looking like Wile E. Coyote after a tussle with the Roadrunner. For the first few years, they'd been as adored as any wounded warriors, gushed over and fussed over while they healed, showing off their scars and telling war stories. Then fewer and fewer of them were coming back, and Jaegers and Rangers became subjects of mockery rather than gratitude. The wounds were symbols of failure, not valor.

Cheung missed another pass, and the ball rolled towards the door straight for Raleigh's feet. It came to a stop against the toes of his boots without a bounce. Even the damn basketball was out of energy.

_We're alive. Woo hoo. We live to fight another day. Rah-rah, bring on the ticker tape parades._

He just stared at it, then looked up. Cheung and Jin stared back, dark eyes dull, empty, and lost and so fucking familiar, like himself in a mirror after Knifehead. He almost turned and walked back out. _Don't chase the rabbit._

He picked up the ball, moved abortively to bounce it back to Cheung, but instead carried it over. Cheung took it.

They stared at each other. Raleigh had spent a few days in Shanghai during PR tours, but never Hong Kong, and his Mandarin was limited to a few useful phrases like "where's the bathroom," "how much is a beer," "I'm a Jaeger pilot," and "your place or mine."

The Wei Tang clan and their crew spoke solid English. Raleigh sighed and made himself talk. "If you want privacy, I can go."

_I don't mean to intrude. I would never do that. I won't be offended if you tell me to go away and leave you alone. Not at all. Please, feel free to tell me to get the hell out of your space. _

They didn't.

They went straight into the hurricane like they were still in their Jaeger. Cheung did a crazy, one-handed flip of the ball to get it spinning on the tip of his finger. Studying it, he mused, "Five years?" No need to ask what he meant. His voice was impressively level.

Raleigh kept his eyes on the ball too as he answered. "Five years, four months." Now they both looked at him, and he concluded, "Three weeks, six days." _Eleven and a half hours. _His own voice was almost steady.

Jin shifted in his chair, nodding to the wall above the utility table. There was a whole row of clocks and calendars on the wall above it, not dissimilar to any other bay. J-techs and Rangers all tended to come from the same military and engineering stock, or at least they all ended up having the same competitive hang-ups about time. The war clock on the main Shatterdome wall was just a macrocosm of every crew's thinking, measuring the time from incident to incident, noting how long it took to recover and parading the results around with pride.

Until the event from which there was no recovery.

* * *

What Herc Hansen and Raleigh had politely not mentioned in front of Pentecost and Mako was that Manila had been a disaster. Lucky Seven had been reduced to scrap. Horizon Brave had taken the kaiju's tail barb straight into her conn-pod. Only Gipsy Danger and her pilots had come out unscathed, but Raleigh and Yancy weren't about to leave the area while their fellow Rangers were unaccounted for. The Rescue-Recovery teams had gotten to the Hansens by the time the Beckets were back on solid ground, and the teams had reports that Horizon Brave's escape pods had jettisoned. Raleigh and Yancy had found themselves moving with their crews down to Horizon's temporary headquarters to wait for news.

That was actually where Raleigh had first met Herc Hansen face-to-face, among their crews during that wait, a mix of grim worry and hope, a celebration of victory combined with dismay that they'd lost two good Jaegers and possibly a crew. They had all crowded around television screens and tablets, watching the news broadcast images of the rescue crews navigating the flood of Kaiju Blue and burning fuel and debris on the water.

"What's more important, the Jaegers or their pilots?" some talking head had blathered.

"Mute the damn commentators!" Herc had spat, and nobody'd argued.

Horizon Brave had been a brother-sister team, Min and Jing Li. Same age difference as Raleigh and Yancy; the sister, Jing, was the older one. They were a cute pair, compact, older than they looked, all kinds of military training. They were part of the Academy's iconic first "class" in 2015, though in reality they were more like co-founders. They'd designed the curriculum that Raleigh and Yancy had attended a year later.

Raleigh and Yancy had only met them once in person when they visited the Academy during training. In Manila, the three crews had chatted a little over the comms while moving into position, making plans for the typical tour of the Philippine PPDC facilities and a post-adrenaline-work-off spar, last pilot standing to win. Followed by bar hopping (bed hopping optional).

The Chinese crews were as close as the Americans or the Aussies, and Min had seen Tendo trying to chat up one of his pod link techs, her enticing curves noticeable even under the shapeless coverall. He'd warned Tendo off as if the girl were his own sister, but Jing had just scoffed that Lu could take care of herself.

Well, Lu and Tendo had wound up sitting practically on top of each other afterwards, but no flirting ensued. Tendo'd been too distracted to even try to cop of a feel.

There'd been a clock stuck on the outside of one of the portable cabinets belonging to Horizon's crew. Somebody'd asked about it, and they'd all learned a little of the various tech crews' traditions. Gipsy Danger's crew started their clocks with each deployment call. Horizon Brave's support crew started theirs as soon as they knew the Jaeger was going to have to go out of service for repairs, competing with themselves and the others for recovery.

Seven hours after visual contact with target, a little more than four hours since Horizon Brave's tech crew had started the maintenance clock, the search and rescue teams had called in. "Confirming both pilots down. Repeat, Horizon Brave pilots down. Visual contact with both bodies."

Lu had calmly stood, walked away from Tendo, and put her fist through Horizon Brave's clock. She hadn't made a sound; people didn't shed a lot of tears by then among the crews. Not in public, anyway. They'd all been on the front lines too long.

But something deep inside Raleigh had throbbed a lot harder than before when any of the other Rangers had gone down with their ships. He'd assumed at the time it was due to having lost a team they'd been fighting alongside. Survivor's guilt.

They had grief down to something like a routine by then. Black armbands on the uniforms for a week, the flag-lowering ceremonies at the Shatterdomes and the Academy. "Behave yourselves in public for a few weeks. Show a little respect. Say something nice in the interviews. Condolences to the nation and the pilots' families," the PR reps had drilled into them.

Yance had been better at the PR stuff too. "We're all brothers and sisters in the Jaeger program," he'd told a reporter before they'd headed back to Anchorage. "Not just the guys related by blood, not just the people in the conn-pods. We'll never forget Min and Jing."

That had been Manila's big sound bite, and Raleigh and the rest of the Gipsy crew had given Yancy hell for it after they got home. "Duuude, you're breaking my heeeart!" Tendo had wailed, waiving a Kleenex around and mopping his eyes when the interview had played on TV.

"So _beautiful!_" Raleigh had mock-sobbed into Yancy's shirt.

Joking about things like that was just another way of taking their minds off the ever-present possibility that one day it would be their team whose clock stopped running.

The rescue and recovery crews determined Jing and Min Li had gone almost simultaneously, blunt force trauma when the kaiju's tail barb gouged out the front of the reactor and the conn pod. At least it had been over fast, and the auto-jettison of the escape pods had worked. Maybe someday in the future it would save some lives.

But they had privately comforted themselves with one foregone conclusion that even Yancy the Realist had never questioned: when the Beckets went down, if they went down, they'd go down together.

So ironic. After two and a half years and four kills, they had still been so naïve.

* * *

Raleigh blinked back to the present, half-expecting to see Mako in front of him, calling him back from the drift.

_I can't have anybody in my head again. _He really hadn't thought it was possible. No chance that he could be drift compatible with anyone after Knifehead. Let alone that he'd fit into someone else, and she would fit into him so perfectly. Driftsex, the irreverent in the Corps called it. As more and more siblings and cousins were found compatible, it also adopted the term Driftcest.

There were all kinds of rumors, and even Raleigh and Yancy had privately admitted they could understand it. Drifting required some open-mindedness about seeing your partner in circumstances that you neither expected nor wanted, and letting those thoughts and emotions and any accompanying reactions float by. They all wondered if things were different with any of the other crews, but... "Don't ask, don't tell," Tendo had said at a club one night, after they'd all had too much to drink and somebody Went There. "Doooon't tell, for the love of God!"

"Once you've been in the drift, you're always sort of two guys in one body that has four arms, four legs, and two brains,"one of the Psych Analysts had explained during the first term at the Academy. With a sly smirk at the (then) all-male breakout class, he'd added, "And two dicks, so you have to be twice as careful when you're off the clock."

But it was all abstract theory until the first round of Drift Sync Testing, and a lot of boasts about "made it this far, not gonna fail now!" went straight out the window. There were a lot of red faces, relatives avoiding each other, and guys muttering "No homo," under their breath during the weeks after testing started.

A lot of guys just couldn't take it and scrubbed out because they couldn't handle the mental/emotional exposure even if they were compatible. Those who didn't just learned to sort of... let it roll by. In each subsequent class, there were more and more women making the final cut, and while the chauvinists among the Corps grumbled, the smarter ones recognized that in a lot of countries, females were either just naturally better or conditioned better to handle drift and all the weirdness that came with it.

To the ones who made it all the way into a conn-pod, including the Beckets, it really... didn't matter that much in the end, from day to day. They could let it roll by like everything else. The few pairs who weren't blood related or emotionally attached before making it to a conn-pod... almost without fail, they became couples, or at least hooked up on a regular basis. "Draw your own conclusions," Tendo used to smirk, though most of the time even he acknowledged that some things were sacred, and didn't make innuendos about the pilots who were related.

The Wei triplets had a legend almost from day one, all three compatible with each other. There had been a lot of speculation on why none of them were assigned to the Mark I and Mark II Jaegers. Raleigh and Yancy had assumed it was just an urban legend that a special Jaeger was being built just for them.

"Bullshit," most of them had agreed... until the press release about Crimson Typhoon. The media had gone nucking futs over it, and for the first time, all the other Rangers found themselves feeling damn near inadequate.

Gunnar Tunnari had blurted, "I don't know if I want to kill those guys or build a fucking temple to them!"

"So the fucking mech has three arms," an especially envious soul had grumped. "Big fucking deal."

* * *

Raleigh blinked back to the present again. He hoped he wasn't ghost drifting... but didn't think so. Mako would've come and found him. This was just run-of-the-mill flashbacks, chasing the rabbit outside the pons.

_Who knew flashbacks that aren't about death and destruction can hurt just as bad? _

Until Knifehead, Raleigh hadn't realized that.

Movement caught his eye; Cheung was pacing, Jin following him with his eyes. When Jin's eyes suddenly stopped, Raleigh followed his gaze and instantly wished he hadn't: there was a big picture, maybe an actual oil painting, of the triplets on the bay wall. This was their home base, of course. They were more moved in here than the other teams.

Most of the Wei paraphernalia in Hong Kong had the three of them in fighter poses, all dignity and strength and intimidation. But the way they were posed in that image, it could have been him and Yance, just grinning for the camera at a spur-of-the-moment shout of "Say cheese!"

Raleigh looked away from it at the same time as Cheung, and they looked at each other. Jin said something, so softly that Raleigh had to go closer, and he had to repeat it. "How do you have done it?" he whispered.

_Fuck. Shit. God fucking damn it. _He had to answer. He'd known this question was coming, couldn't claim he didn't understand the imperfect grammar. He'd come to hear it, to try and answer it, try and give these guys _something, _anything, some vague little cobweb-wisps of experience that might somehow help. Honor Yancy. Honor Hu. Make it all worth something - or at least make it mean something.

How had he done it? He didn't know. _Five years, four months, three weeks, six days, twelve hours, he's been gone, and the clock's still running, and somehow I kept walking. One foot in front of the other. _

The silence was pressing down on his head. They'd stopped dribbling the basketball. He'd wanted the noise of it to quit before, finding it more irritating than the Kaidanovskys' hard house… now the lack of it was about to send him into a panic attack.

And every time he was actually moved to be afraid, his mind went to the same place:

_"__Raleigh, listen to me - " The screech of tortured metal, pain from the drive suit's nerve receptors – ah, FUCK, my head – then _real _pain no breath limbs out of control – RaleighlistenRaleighohshitRals – blackpainpainpaincrushingblow – Nothing._

_Painpainpain my head, my arm can't breathe can't breathe Yancy where the fuck – _"Warning: Neural Overload"_ – cannon, one cannon, pain everywhere – _"Cannon Loading"_ – dark, lights down, pain pain shoot the fucking cannon – where's Yance, too heavy, it hurts, pod's dark – YANCYYYY WHERE ARE YOU?!_

"Raleigh." Dark eyes in front of him, bruised and blackened and bandaged face – Raleigh lurched backwards and landed on his ass.

"What -" _That_ had been a ghost drift, and he'd probably woken Mako up. Or given her a nice new batch of nightmares. Around a throat tight with horror not a fraction less than five years, four months ago, he croaked, "Sorry." _Sorry, Mako. _He'd meant to help fellow Rangers out, and now everyone was having to deal with his shit again.

Cheung sat down on the floor a few feet from him, rolling the basketball under his fingers. "Memory does not go away," he observed.

Raleigh shook his head, feeling pathetic and useless. Then there was a rush of indignation like he hadn't felt since before Knifehead…

Oh. Yep, Mako was up.

* * *

Chuck wasn't planning on admitting anything. But he never did sleep well the first night after a fight, so he worked out in the Kwoon until the wee hours. His route back to his room was only a detour to avoid Marshall and Herc; he just didn't feel like dealing with them tonight.

Unfortunately, said detour took him straight between Mori and Becket's rooms, where Mori's shriek nearly sent him through the ceiling. "Jesus, fuck!" Staggering against Becket's door, he went to pull a gun that was integrated into Striker, not his hip.

Mori roared again, pain and rage and panic, and Chuck righted himself and was going for her door when her words stopped him cold. "No – Yancy, where are you!? YANCYYY!"

Mori had taken on a decidedly different accent. Took him a few seconds, but he put it together. _First full-length drift in combat. Shit. _Chuck looked over his shoulder, hoping Becket would come shake Mori out of it, but his room was unoccupied. So it came down to him, and even before Gipsy had saved their asses, he wouldn't have left a fellow Ranger in the grip of a driftmare. Well, probably not.

He hammered on the door. "Mori! Wake up! Come on, snap out of it!"

"YANCE - " There was a shuffle, a thud and a grunt of pain as she fell out of bed, then a muttered curse in Japanese. Satisfied, Chuck decided not to stick around for the awkward part, and was heading down the hall as Mako came out of her room. "Thank you," she said, as he knew she would, and he just waved a hand over his shoulder. Piss-poor manners, but Mori's opinion of him couldn't really sink any lower, and everyone knew he was born in a barn, so what did it matter? But then, "Wait! Where is Raleigh?"

"How should I know?" he demanded. Did she think they were all best mates now? A look back at her in her pants and tank top, and he saw she had drivesuit burns. _God damn it. _Those things stung like a bitch until they healed up into those sexy scars the media loved. It was superficial as injuries went, and healing didn't take too long, but… _Wonder if any of us will live that long. _

_"__You're a Ranger, for Christ's sake!_"

_She's a Ranger now. Saved our paralyzed asses. _Now she was knocking herself out of bed with ghost drift nightmares, looking around for her partner and still half-linked to him if that distracted expression was a hint. Mori would never have betrayed that much distress before now, let alone to Chuck.

He dropped his eyes even though she wasn't staring him down this time. "Last I heard, he was down in Typhoon's bay."

Mako's eyes widened, and there was that flash of comprehension. Standing in the middle of the corridor with bare feet in her jammies, she still looked more like a Ranger than ever before. With an absent mutter of "_Domo_," she made to run right past him for the bays.

"Oy. You gonna get dressed first?"

_There you are, Mori. _She turned scarlet, and he smirked as she spun around and scurried back into her room. _Old man always does say embarrassment's the way to snap you out of ghosting._ But his lightened mood didn't last long. He went to his room trying in vain to keep his own mind off all the jockeys who'd gone down in sparks and darkness of a conn-pod, and one who'd survived still screaming for his brother.

**_To be continued..._**

**_Coming soon: _**_Mako joins her partner and ruminates on the path of loss and sorrow that led them both here, and the two of them try to ease the burden on the two remaining Weis in __Chapter Two: Cadence__._

**Please remember to review!**

_**Additional Notes: ** This fic draws heavily from the Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero graphic novel and the other tidbits that Guillermo Del Toro and Travis Beacham have given us. I've deviated a little from the pre-movie canon regarding Horizon Brave - the writers identified another team as Horizon's pilots and reported her destroyed in Lima. So for this fic's purposes, while Horizon's first pilots were killed, the Jaeger herself was salvaged and the canon Rangers were the successor pilots._

_**Translation:** Domo = "Thank you" in Japanese._


	2. Cadence

_**A/N**__: Many thanks to everyone for the reviews! To answer a few questions, this story expands the time frame between the Hong Kong Incident and the final Breach attack (the movie isn't quite clear, but I'm putting about 24-48 hours between the death of Otachi and the next movement in the Breach.) I also play a little fast and loose with Jin and Cheung's recovery - my medical knowledge is limited to brief checks of Wikipedia. This first story in my Pacific Rim series is just a two-parter, but I have an already-finished sequel that covers the final battle and goes into its aftermath. I do hope there is interest!_

_Now, Mako's POV of both the past and the present._

**Chapter Two: Cadence**

Until she drifted with Raleigh Becket, Mako had labored under the popular impression that he'd finished the fight with Knifehead to avenge his brother. Now, after seven hours of stable drift, she knew that most of the stories about the Beckets' final battle were Jaeger-myth. Gipsy Danger's duel with Knifehead was a tragic epic even without embellishment, but speculation and gossip had romanticized it still more.

Mako had believed the apocrypha all too easily, since it paralleled her own fantasies of how she would make the monsters pay. But in the drift, first in their disastrous test run and then in the deployment, she discovered how very different reality had been - and how very much worse.

The battle with Knifehead had fallen to chaos, a blur of pain and blood and cold and dark and strobe-flashing lights and thunderous noise all coalescing into one heart-stopping, hideously-clear sight of the wall of the conn pod ripping away and the mottled gray-green claw tearing Yancy out with it. The dual spike of his and Raleigh's shock and fear, the pain reverberating through their bodies and shared minds, from their injuries and their Jaeger's - utter confusion and loss of all control in the space of nanoseconds.

And then… there were no words to describe the moment of death from a vicarious witness. Raleigh hadn't recognized it when it happened, at least not in the front of his mind. Half of the handshake had imploded with a final salvo of panic and agony and bewilderment, leaving a mental black hole in its wake.

Raleigh's neural load had increased fourfold, his body buffeted by the blows to the Jaeger from the still-attacking kaiju and the neural relays transforming every inch of damage to still more physical pain and freezing rain blasting through a gaping hole in the pod wall. Light and dark, a strobe effect from sparks and failing systems, hot metal and hot blood and cold wind and cold water, his brain torn in half and crushed under the sheer mental weight of the Jaeger and all her systems... and amid it all, he'd been trying to _find _Yancy.

One part delirium from his overburdened brain, one part simple confusion at events moving too fast to process, one part denial. Vengeance had never come into it during those last seconds. All his crazed, bewildered brain could process was that he couldn't _see _his brother, couldn't _feel _him and that wasn't right, Yancy had to be somewhere. The cannon was overloading, and there was a kaiju trying to rip into the conn-pod, and _where was Yancy - _it was _looking _in at him and it had _hurt _them, it was still coming and gnawing on his cannon arm and if it got any further into the pod, he wouldn't be able to find Yance and fix their broken handshake.

It roared, and he roared back and finally managed to fire right into its mouth. More light and pain followed as it ripped part of the cannon arm away, but finally, _finally, _it went backwards into the water, its head a blackened mass.

Only then, when silence fell and the kaiju's corpse sank, had Raleigh accepted that Yancy was dead.

Well, "accept" was not quite the word for it. But on some level, as rain and lubricant dripped onto him in the torn pod, the emergency lights dull and red inside, pitch blackness outside apart from lightning and sparks, he'd figured out that his brother wasn't coming back. He wasn't here somewhere in the pod, injured, nor somewhere outside...

_Gone_. Yancy, gone.

Gipsy Danger had stood motionless for a long time. Hours? Minutes? In the ever-growing physical and mental shock, Raleigh had never been exactly sure what happened next.

Ironically, Mako was. She knew more about his journey to shore than he did, and he'd only found out from the drift. The details were in the impersonal, dispassionate words in the Anchorage Shatterdome Kaiju Engagement (With Fatality) Report. She'd read the entire file, including the classified material, while preparing her report on the suitability of Raleigh Becket for reenlistment.

Mako was glad that her personal hopes and ambitions hadn't completely dulled her to the emotions hidden by those neat lines of type, or she would have been very ashamed now. But even driven by her desire to pilot a Jaeger, she had recognized that she was reading a truly sad story.

Not just for Raleigh Becket either. Understandably consumed at the time by his own wounds, Raleigh hadn't learned of all that had passed among the witnesses during and after the fight.

When Gipsy crashed onto the shore, the _Saltchuck's _crew had been the second witnesses on the scene. The rescue choppers couldn't reach Gipsy in the storm, and LOCCENT had ended up in radio contact with the fishing boat. As Mako read the file, that transcript had been the trigger for the first of many pangs of grief.

_"_Saltchuck, Saltchuck_, this is Anchorage Local Command Center of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, do you copy?"_

_"We hear you, Anchorage! We've got a Jaeger two hundred meters to the Southeast, and there was a kaiju! I think they killed it, it hasn't come back, but the Jaeger's got major damage! We've been trying to raise the Coast Guard!" _

_"Cutters are on their way, but choppers can't reach your location in those winds! Can you describe the Jaeger's condition? Is it upright?"_

_"Jaeger's still standing! No response on any of the radio channels. I've got a guy on the deck with a megaphone trying to make contact now... can't see much, most of our lights are down. Her head's ripped ope,n and one arm is gone. We can't risk getting much closer in these seas... damn it, no sign of life!"_

_"... Wait. I hear something... is she moving? She is!" _[Cheers]

_"Anchorage, she's turning! She's turning back towards shore! Colin! Hey, Colin, hail her again! Pilots must be alive!"_

_"...Anchorage, she's turning towards us, maybe she hears our hails... no, she's turning towards shore again. She's looking off balance. One arm's completely gone, and the head section's ripped wide open. Your pilots may be hurt."_

_"... This is weird, she's still turning."_

There had been CLASSIFIED tags on the transcript, for reasons Mako hadn't fully understood until she compared the _Saltchuck_ crew's reports to the statements that had been given to the media. No public media outlet had ever reported - or even known - that after destroying Knifehead, Gipsy Danger had stood in the sea for nearly twenty minutes, silent to the transmissions from shore or even the shouts from the fishing boat, and turned around and around as though the Jaeger herself was in shock.

_"...Okay, she's walking now. She's definitely walking towards shore. We've only got partial engines, but we're following her." _[_Saltchuck_ transmitted coordinates and heading. Choppers dispatched to nearest safe points, estimated intercept time, three hours.]

_"_Saltchuck_, this is J-Tech Chief Tendo Choi from the Anchorage Shatterdome. I'm in charge of Gipsy's support crew. We've still got too much wind offshore for our choppers, so you're all we've got on her position."_

_"Son, your Jaeger saved our asses from a giant sea crocodile from outer space!" _[Laughter]_ "We're not stopping till we thank those brave bastards personally! What're their names?"_

_"Becket. Raleigh and Yancy Becket. Brothers. Try calling them again from your deck if you're close enough. We're got almost nothing on our communications. If her pod is that bad, she may have no radio."_

_"Hey, Colin, their names are Raleigh and Yancy! Call their names!" _[Background noise, reportedly _Saltchuck_ crew attempted repeated hails of Gipsy Danger by crew names and call signs.]_ "Still no answer, but she's still walking."_

_Saltchuck_ had moored on the nearest dock as Gipsy came in to the beach, and reported her collapse on the shore. Half her crew had run off the ship with their meager first aid supplies and blankets while radioing what they found back to the captain, who radioed it back to LOCCENT. The PPDC investigators wanted them taken for debriefing at once, but it hadn't worked out that way – because as soon as the boat's crew realized that there was only one pilot in the stricken Jaeger, even before investigators arrived, _Saltchuck _left the dock and went back out to search for Yancy Becket.

Twenty hours later, out of fuel and towed back to shore to finally be debriefed, those hardened seamen had cried.

_"He's just a kid!" _the first mate had said of Raleigh, again and again.

Conducting the interview himself, though he could have delegated the job to someone else, Tendo had told them, _"Yancy was the older brother."_

_"You're sure he's not just missing?" _the captain had asked. _ "We can re-fuel and go back to the search, call in more boats - "_

_"Pilot drivesuits can withstand a lot of extremes, but not long-term. Even if he'd survived the pod damage, the kaiju, and the fall, at those water temps... I'm sorry. Yancy Becket is definitely dead."_

_"Hell."_ [Interviewer T. Choi's Note: Eyewitnesses in emotional distress.]_ "We're the sorry ones. Did you know them?"_

_"Yeah. Good guys. Most of our Rangers are pretty young. They have to be, for training."_

_"I didn't think... all that crazy techno, mind-meld stuff, I didn't think only one co-pilot could survive like that."_

_"Between you and me, neither did we. I sure as hell wish we hadn't found out this way." _[Supervisor's Note: Support Chief Choi was issued a verbal warning against discussing Jaeger Program and PPDC health and safety matters with civilians.]

During the Restoration Project, Mako had talked with Tendo many times about that investigation. "That was my twelfth engagement investigation, third with Ranger fatalities. Since then I've debriefed a few hundred civilian eyewitnesses. Buenaventura, Lima, Seattle, all the big American losses. Anchorage was the only time I've really thought I'd lose it in the interview room."

"Well, that was the only time that one pilot survived the other's loss in action," Mako reasoned gently as Tendo's eyes brimmed. "And you were with them from the Academy, those two in particular. They were your friends."

"Yeah. Jesus, it still hurts so bad." He turned away and yanked a handful of Kleenex from their box with more force than necessary. Mako studied her notes to give him a moment to collect himself. Tendo chuckled, and she took that as permission to turn back. "You sure you still want to be a Ranger? We got good at winning – Raleigh used to say that. But even before the tide turned, we were getting really good at mourning too."

"Yes, I am sure." That question usually irritated her, but that time it hadn't, since she recognized the sorrow that drove it. Even so, Mako had still been sure. All the way through 2025, the closing of the Shatterdomes, the fading hope, the restoration of Gipsy, she had been so very sure of what she wanted.

* * *

Even now, she was still sure. But she couldn't deny that there were many beliefs in which she'd been very wrong.

Such as the capabilities of Raleigh Becket. The strength and courage and sheer force of will and skill in Raleigh Becket. She had been no better than Chuck Hansen in her judgment of him, her assumptions about his motives and his commitment. In that, she was ashamed of herself.

So when she sensed his self-condemnation over the ghost drift, she was quite angry with him.

No one had a right to rebuke Raleigh Becket for his pain. Not even Raleigh himself.

The only reason she didn't storm in on him was the presence of the Weis. The scene in their empty bay made her throat tighten, seeing them covered in bandages for their physical wounds and their haunted eyes a testament to the non-physical one. They both smiled at her, knowing all too well why she had come, why she would presume to intrude at such a moment, and not questioning it. She was Raleigh's co-pilot, his drift partner. She was permitted to be anywhere that Raleigh was.

"You should be resting," she scolded Jin and Cheung mildly. Less than a day since Typhoon had fallen; by rights, neither one should be released from medical yet.

Jin smiled and shrugged at her. "How do we rest?" His eyes darted to Raleigh, and in that look, the question went from rhetorical to dead-earnest.

The ghost drift was fading, but not gone, and she felt the sting that she knew was from Raleigh's heart. Raleigh was _trying _to answer them; she didn't need a drift hangover to realize that. But he was barely hanging on to his own emotions. Like the rebound of a broken handshake, the load on his mind and heart had increased exponentially, though she had no doubt that even Chuck Hansen would have trouble maintaining his composure.

Mako reached out and found herself stroking his hair. It was a physical instinct she couldn't explain and would never have thought she possessed for another human. Sensei had not embraced her since the day she'd completed her application for the Academy, and she'd backed away from such comforts even before then.

Strange. Nor had Raleigh been the one who tended to initiate hugs or touches since his earliest youth. He and his sister Jazmine had fought like cats and dogs for much of their lives, and even their mother had not been very demonstrative, their father still less so...

_Very strange. _Before he became a Ranger, the only one in Raleigh's history who had given such comforts had been Yancy, finding the compulsion to do it as the elder brother. They had backed off from such things too as young men, apart from the rowdy, casual slaps and punches of "bro" camaraderie. Then they had entered the Academy and become drift partners, and found themselves more prone to embracing. After their first combat, it had been still stronger. Amid the stress of fighting, injuries, and deaths they weren't always able to prevent, physical contact had soothed Raleigh and Yancy as never before.

Jin and Cheung were watching them as Raleigh leaned against her hip. He looked up and met her eyes, and a tear escaped his; she quickly brushed it away for him.

She'd never done that for anyone, nor felt an impulse to do it. The surprise must have shown on her face, because the Weis knew what she was thinking. "That happens," Cheung observed. "After combat in drift. You change."

Raleigh laughed roughly and looked down, but managed to speak. "Yeah. Even without ghosting. Yamarashi snapped the hydraulics lines in Gipsy's leg, and I tore my ACL in the rig. Yancy was holding my hand in medical. He hadn't done that since I was twelve."

"We too changed," Jin admitted. "In families, we touch, but not as Americans do..." he frowned to himself, and said slowly, "'cuddle.' Even children. Men, even brothers, we do not do that. After drift, after combat, we did."

"Everyone does," Mako said, and unashamedly continued petting Raleigh's head. "Psych studied it."

Would she be so unrestrained if they were not in the sole company of fellow pilots? She wasn't sure... but all the statistics said yes. Habits and attitudes both individual and cultural seemed to be rewritten in the minds of everyone who drifted. "PDA," the Americans called it. The blood related teams all pulled physically closer; they were seen in public arm-in-arm, frequently embracing, and away from public eye it was still more. Rumors of outright incest floated around. With the non-related pairs, it was still less restrained; sexual relationships were almost a foregone conclusion, and how none had been caught completely _in flagrante_ and ended up on YouTube was a long-running mystery. Mako was with the majority opinion that there had been multiple sightings, just fortunately seen only by understanding PPDC personnel.

From a culture even more physically restrained than the Weis', she'd been shocked by such open wantonness between unmarried men and women. Nor had the idea of homosexuality really troubled her, but there again, the indiscretion by the pilot pairs had.

That had waned very fast once she'd entered the Academy. Even before she went near the simulators and pons testing lab, she had realized the rules and the mores were very different when fighting for humanity's survival, and it wasn't a bad thing.

What right did anyone have to chastise soldiers for physically comforting each other when they physically felt each other's pain, fear, or sorrow? For ordinary people, to kiss and touch so intimately in the company of others might be unseemly. But Rangers were _not_ ordinary people.

By adulthood, nearly everyone had lost someone. In this world, many people had seen their families slaughtered by monsters. Grief was ordinary. Fear and pain and rage and loneliness were all ordinary, if nothing to be dismissed or taken lightly.

To end it all, the Rangers took on still a greater load than what they carried in their own hearts and minds, and risked still more. Another person's life, another person's memories and sorrows and hurts became their own.

Sensei hadn't lost Tamsin-san mid-battle, but he had never been the same since her death. The few veteran pilots who survived to retire sometimes outlived their partners. The bond was permanent and inexorable, and when it broke, it left a wound that would never heal.

When it broke traumatically... she now knew vicariously how that felt. But she had no more idea than Raleigh how his sanity had remained intact. She knew he often doubted that it actually had.

As if he'd heard or sensed her musings, Raleigh murmured, "They asked... how I've done it. For five years, four months."

_Three weeks, six and a half days_, Mako finished mentally. She sat down on the floor beside him and slipped an arm around his shoulders, letting him lean against her as much as he wished. He accepted that, but shifted restlessly, looking around the room and fidgeting. She knew it meant that he wanted to answer, but did not know what the answer was.

Jin and Cheung looked at each other, seeming to be working towards something themselves. Raleigh sensed it as well and beckoned to them as if they were sparring in the Kwoon. _Attack. "Bring it." I can take it, _Mako translated in her head.

"What did you do?" Raleigh frowned, and Jin elaborated, "Alone in Gipsy."

Raleigh flinched against her, and Jin and Cheung both began chewing on their lower lips, but he knew the answer to that question. "One foot in front of the other," he said. His head starting to sink to her shoulder, he asked dully, "You need to translate that?"

"We understand," said Jin. He looked at his brother, who nodded. "We..." He bit his lip, then said to Mako in Mandarin, "_We didn't feel Hu go consciously. He was the only one conscious after the pod was crushed_._ He was able to trigger the jettisons for us, but not himself. We awoke in the infirmary to find him... gone_." His eyes glittered, and the agony in his face nearly broke what was left of her composure, as he went on in a whisper. "_We don't know if he felt us go, or if he was alone in his last moments._"

Now there were tears escaping her eyes, and she still had to translate for Raleigh. She tried to steel herself, but her voice still trembled, and her grip on him tightened. He managed not to cry outright, but she could feel him shaking. "I'm sorry," he told Jin and Cheung. "I'm so sorry."

"Why did you not die?" Cheung blurted.

"Huh?" Raleigh croaked, as Mako hissed, and Jin glared at his brother.

Cheung winced and stammered, "I meant - after."

"Oh." Raleigh scrubbed at his face and stared at the wall above the work tables with its row of clocks. Mako found herself petting him again. "I thought about... sometimes I thought about - okay, a lot of times. Dying. I... I couldn't. I couldn't insult him like that, by throwing away what he had stolen from him. Killing myself would've finished what the kaiju'd been trying to do. I couldn't dishonor his memory that way, even if I... didn't see much reason to go on."

Mako translated for him, and to her relief, she saw the first flicker of pride return to their eyes. They understood that. They agreed with it. The kaiju had already taken so many people. Suicides had skyrocketed in every place they could be tracked since K-Day, but within the PPDC, the rate was bizarrely low. Mako had little doubt that Raleigh had just articulated the reasoning in most minds. Whatever the pain in body and heart, they would not give the kaiju another human life.

But that didn't make living from day to day any easier. Raleigh was thinking along the same lines, still trying to answer the original question: _How?_

"After I... got released from the hospital, I tried to keep busy. That helped sometimes. When it didn't, I just... one foot in front of the other. One minute... the next... then the next..." He let go of Mako and pulled himself to his feet, going to inspect the clocks, most showing the same year, month, and date in international time, but many showing different hours and minutes and seconds.

Cheung joined him and pointed to each of them. "Local time. Time since deployment. Time off watch in repair. Time since other teams' deployment until kill reported." There were three clocks stacked in a vertical line, each next to a badge with the emblem of a different Jaeger: Cherno Alpha, Striker Eureka, Gipsy Danger. "There were many more of these before."

Two of the three were still running, but it was Gipsy Danger's clock that had not started. Mako knew Typhoon's support crew would have seen no more reason to care about traditions after seeing their Jaeger sink in the bay, assuming all three of their pilots dead. Cheung stopped Cherno's clock and reset it to the time that Cherno Alpha had been declared lost, minutes after Typhoon's destruction.

Jin sat up a little in his wheelchair, and nodded to his brother - who still had his back to him. Cheung took Cherno's clock down and went to one of the many small-parts drawers along the walls, pulling it all the way open. The drawer was surprisingly long. Raleigh looked in and turned pale. Mako scrambled to her feet and joined him as Cheung gently laid Cherno's clock down in the front of the drawer on a lining of white silk. Behind it lay well over thirty other clocks.

Mako's dazed mind placed each emblem, and observed that the clocks were arranged to mark the date and time that nearly every Jaeger had been lost, in the order that they had been lost. Her own eyes were drawn at once to another clock bearing the emblem of Gipsy Danger.

**2020-02-29 08:55:44**

She shifted to Raleigh's side under his arm and slipped both of hers around his waist, resting her cheek against his chest. Her eyes traveled down the row of emblems, years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Cherno Alpha's clock had stopped at **2025-07-26 22:04:39**.

_Five years, four months, three weeks, six days. _Raleigh's count of the time had been exact. The official time of Gipsy's loss was a few hours later, after dawn on the beach a few miles to the east of where Yancy had died. No one could ever know exactly when Yancy Becket's life had ended, not even Raleigh. It was likely sometime between 6:26 when Knifehead's signature reappeared on the LOCCENT monitors, and 6:29, when instruments had recorded the last plasma discharge and the signature had vanished for good. Most of the experts agreed it was next to impossible that Yancy had been alive when he hit the water.

"It was quick," Tendo had insisted to Raleigh afterward. "He didn't suffer."

_Yeah, he did, _Raleigh had thought, but been too sick, too lost to debate the issue. Tendo's intentions had been good. Even in the black pit of shock and despair that had been the first days in the hospital, some part of Raleigh had recognized that. He'd even admired it, that a casual player like Tendo would go to such efforts to console the inconsolable.

Raleigh shifted, but Mako felt his arm tighten to keep her against him, and with his free hand, he brushed his fingertips against Gipsy's emblem. "Thank you for doing this, all these years," he said roughly to the Weis.

Jin looked surprised. "There are many memorials."

"But not our own. Not by our own kind," Raleigh replied, and Mako saw, to her intense relief, that same glimmer of determination that she'd seen return to Jin and Cheung's eyes before.

_As long as any of us are alive, it is not over. As long as one Jaeger is still standing, it is not over. And while a few Rangers are still here, we will remember. _

Raleigh turned to the clocks still on the wall and hovered a hand over Typhoon's repair clock that would never be reset. He raised his eyebrows for permission. The other two nodded, and Raleigh tapped in a start time: the date, hour, and minute that Crimson Typhoon had been deemed lost and Tang Hu Wei had died. The clock began to run again, showing thirteen hours, three minutes, the seconds ticking silently past. Then Raleigh held out a hand, and it took Jin a moment to realize he wanted the basketball.

Gazing at the clock, Raleigh began bouncing it. One second. Another. Another. Then another. And another. Second by second by second, the Weis' ball echoed through the bay again. Slower than before, but steady, like a heartbeat.

"That's how I did it."

Cheung dashed the back of his hand across his face, then stepped forward, and keeping the rhythm, Raleigh passed it to him. With one hand, Cheung dribbled it, eyes going from the ball to the clock to his one remaining brother. After a few minutes, he passed it to Jin. One beat per second.

It was a sort of hypnosis, standing there with her arms around Raleigh and his around her, his chin resting on top of her head and hers against his shoulder, as Jin and Cheung passed the ball between each other again, second by second. After a while, Cheung kept it dribbling under his one hand and looked at the regular clock.

"You should rest," he pointed out, giving them a soft smile. "You are still on duty."

Mako and Raleigh murmured their good-nights and left the bay still arm in arm. In the silence of the weary Shatterdome, the corridors and empty rooms surrounding Crimson Typhoon's bay still rang with the rhythm of the Weis' heartbeat.

**~Fin~**

**Please don't forget to review!**

_My sequel, __Conflict of Interest__, delves into the POVs of Chuck, Stacker, Herc, and the rest of our _Pacific Rim_ heroes through the final battle and its aftermath. Please do let me know if you're interested in reading it!_


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